Mistpouffers

Doubse Hystérie

solo • 0 • 2016

eRikm
Doubse Hystérie 6 tracks : CD edition

At the inception of this commissioned work offered to me by "Intermèdes Géographiques" in 2011, I was looking for a meaning and a relationship between my work as a composer and the specific constraints of this project.I selected six pieces from the nine initial ones in order to adapt to the CD format and to a home listening.

Select archive I

VITAL WEEKLY / N°1000 / Week 39ERIKM - L’ART DE LA FUITE (LP by Sonoris)Over the years there have been reviews of the work of erikM, as he likes to spell out his name, sometimes solo, but by my own estimation more in collaboration with other people. His main instruments are media products, such as vinyl and CDs, which is damages and then starts playing again, layering them together into new compositions. He has been doing so for more than twenty years. In 1995 he released his fourth cassette, in which he worked with vinyl more than CDs, using, if the postcards are any help, three turntables at the time, scratching records, carving grooves to create loops, cutting records in half and sticking them back together, making burn holes and such like. It’s not unlike the work of Milan Knizak, who coined the term ’broken music’ already in the sixties and Christian Marclay. ErikM put this on a four-track cassette and created his own compositions with these sounds, and I must say I quite enjoyed this lot. If I’m honest I find the whole turntablist movement a bit
tiring, but what erikM does here is very good. His pieces aren’t some scratch records being played, but by layering various sounds together he creates pieces of music, which are engaging to hear. Minimal at times, loop-wise of course, but erikM takes exactly the right sound of a record and fiddles around with it, so he slip in a melody of some kind, such as in the beautiful ’Rose’. Occasionally of course there is noise, which seems hard to avoid if you do this, but they don’t seem to be around here a lot. All ten pieces are kept to a minimum in length, except perhaps for ’Ich War Ein Armer Heidensohn’, which is almost nine minutes, in which erikM explores his material and plays a ’song’, rather than presenting some experiments of an electro-acoustic nature. I must admit I didn’t hear any of the erikM cassettes in the nineties, but if the others were like this, then I’d say : bring it on. This is an excellent record ; if you are into turntablism, good ol’ fashioned experimental music
with a fine dash of noise sewn into this or just into overlooked obscurities : this is the place to be (this week that is). (FdW)

Transfall

solo • 0 • 2012

Transfall is composed of six pieces that were all made on commission either for compilations of various labels, dance choreographies or instrumental ensemble. Except for Austral, these pieces share a method of composition as well as the instrumentation. My wish to collect these pieces on the same album allows the listener to hear my compositional work in the field of musique concrète, both mixed and electroacoustic. The time spent on the composition of some of these pieces
gave me the possibility to ‘break out’, that is to get out of my usual processes of ‘degeneration/generation’ of a body or of a multiplicity of ‘pre-existing sound objects’. Thus my gesture shifted, I have looked for and recorded my own sound materials.

Austral

Austral is a mixed work (electronic and video) for ensemble, originally composed for Laborintus (contemporary ensemble). This creation was previously imagined in its origins to be re-interpreted by other musical aesthetics. Austral is a pretext, a vector. My main interest is to deal directly with the sounds, music, and ‘noises’ produced by musicians : the specific archetypes of their own training (amateur or professional). This piece calls for an individual memory, as well as a collective memory...

LUX PAYLLETTES

solo • 0 • 2010

With this piece, I have been working with the sound material of Western cinema, after its multiple supports : optical film sound, video tapes, dvd and also with sounds that I recorded in cinemas during projections.
Originally, my interest in this « process-handling » is the very relation to listening to the motion picture sounds, its clichés, tensions, loosening, sound effects, and the emotional palettes coming out. In the meantime, Lux echoes a reflexion about the process of identification to such actors or groups of population, including a potentially schizophrenic relation over these projections (Hallucinations).
My desire, on this occasion, was to support the emergence of psychic images so that the listener would seize different elements to create his own decorations, lights, landscapes. Via this range of acoustic suggestions, the listener would let him be led to the centre of his own interpretations.The first empirical phase of creation originated in an intuitive selection of musics, sound effects, and audience reactions. Gradually, as a meaningful “colour” arose from these sound images, the layout of comments released a social criticism, through the prism of popular cinema. 2007

Steme

solo • 0 • 2008

eRikm
2003 / Prod.2008

eRikm’s remarkable compositional work Stème originates from deliberately damaged CDs of 1-minute works deconstructed and manipulated in real time."Between his reputation as swift shifting improviser, concréte composer and turntable deconstructionist, Marseilles based artist eRikm has earned himself an enviable position in the European music community. With Stéme, his most ambitious and fully realised compositional work to date, he devolves and recontextualises the boundaries between sound source and sound media.>>>

Variations Opportunistes

solo • 0 • 2007

eRikm

Created entirely by looping small snippets of CDs and then treating them in the studio, the newest album from eRikm makes for a surprisingly atmospheric listen. "Correlation I" begins with the expected glitch effects, but as the five-second fragment (taken from a composition by Jean-Philippe Rameau) is looped back on itself at different pitches and drawn out by sustain, it takes on an ethereal character, less like damaged playback equipment than intentional ambience.>>>